Freehand Nail Art :: India Flag

I’m going to India for 2 weeks later this month, and India’s Independence Day just so happens to be today! So I obviously had to do a nail art to commemorate this occasion. I was very young when I last spent time in India during their Independence Day so I really can’t say what the festivities were like (I probably couldn’t even tell you what I had for lunch yesterday. I just have a terrible memory in general).

Don’t fret! I won’t be alone. I will be sharing my Indian experience with my travel buddy (who also happens to be my boyfriend). We will be travelling to 7 different cities. I will talk more in depth about my escapades when I get back and have more to share!

As you can tell, I have a certain way of photographing my nail art, and in order to do the Indian flag, I had to figure out how I would fit the flag on my nails. I did my hand pose (lol) and mapped out the lines by eye. I then cut strips of striping tape to use as I went along.

The first bit of tape was applied close to the tip of my middle fingernail for the top section of the flag. Once I had painted Art Orange by Avon onto the majority of my nail, I peeled the tape off before the polish had time to dry (this prevents any snagging).

I did the same on my ring finger, except this time I applied the tape closer to my cuticle and also applied some tape closer to the tip of my nail. In these small sections, I pained Art Orange (cuticle area) and Bonsai by Revlon on the top of my nail. I peeled the tape off to reveal crisp lines. I repeated the first step on my pinkie.

Now it was time for the painting the white. I used the brush from the bottle to fill in as much as I could without messing up the sharp lines. For the more trickier bits, I used a very fine detailing brush.

Once this was done, I applied a fast drying top coat.

WE’RE NOT DONE!! Keep reading…

I blobbed some blue acrylic paint onto paper and used my super fine detailing brush to create the Blue wheel and its spokes. In reality there are 24 spokes of the wheel, but I couldn’t do that do I did what I could (don’t hate me plz).

Fun Fact:The wheel was adopted after the Independence of India in 1947, replacing the spinning wheel (or you could say it replaced the Union Jack because British India innit).

What I love about using acrylic paint is that if I happen to make a mistake (which I did when I tried painting the perfect circle), I can simply scratch the paint of gently with a toothpick.

Finally done! Well, add glossy top coat and then done.

Initially, I had planned on doing the flag on three fingers, and then doing an abstract design on the other two nails using the colours of the Indian flag. However, once I was done with the flag, it just looked a lot nicer on it’s own. The focus was on the flag, and so I decided to leave it as is.